Holidays in Heck (19 page)

Djuman Kul led the lone palomino forward. He told me in Kyrgyz, Shamil translating, “This horse is strong, but kind.” I wish I had not overheard Djuman telling each of the other trekkers, “This horse is strong, but kind.”

I dubbed the horse “Trigger” and hopped aboard. There is a trick to this. You turn the left stirrup backward, place
your left foot in it, and, springing with your right leg, swing yourself up so that you . . . slam your whole body smack into the side of the horse. Shamil helped me up. I had an excellent, if precarious, view of Kyrgyzstan. It looks like the American West. Not the dry-gulch western-movie American West (for which I had, without long underwear or adequate rain gear, packed), but the whole West—purple mountain majesties, fruited plain, noble forest spires, canyons as grand as grand can be, packed into one place with about as much sign of human habitation as Lewis and Clark saw. (Sacagawea, please go to the satellite phone.) It would have taken my breath away if I hadn't been too scared to breathe.

Not that Trigger was giving me much to be scared of. Per my riding lessons, I assumed a proper “seat,” placing the balls of my feet on the stirrup treads with heels down and foot, hip, and shoulder aligned. I held the reins low, threaded over my pinkies and up into my hands, “carried like two flutes of champagne,” as I'd been taught. I felt for the correct gentle contact with Trigger's bit. I applied a subtle pressure with my lower legs and gave the reins the requisite slight flick. Trigger stood there. I tried all of the above a little more forcefully. Trigger stood there. I tried more forcefully yet. Trigger stood even more there. Everyone else was riding away. Djuman Kul handed me the quirt. He pantomimed a ferocious Patrick O'Brian novel shipboard lashing. It is one thing to beat a miscreant of about one's own size who has been firmly tied to a mast. Beating a 900-pound critter that could buck you to China and run over there before you landed and then kick and bite you is another. Trigger received the sort of spanking that a six-year-o1d gets on a birthday. He ambled off, thankfully in the right direction.

That direction was onto the middle of a bridge over a small but Napoleonic mountain stream. I'd noticed the bridge earlier. What I'd noticed was that I wouldn't care to cross it on foot. It was made of several logs arranged like the losing turn in a game of pick-up-sticks. I cared a lot less to cross it on six feet, two of which had come out of their stirrups.

“Trust the horse!” Shamil yelled. “Let the horse do the thinking!” It is an experience, the first time you stake your life on a brain to which you wouldn't assign the simplest task such as keeping the lawn short without destroying the flower beds. I endured a mortal version of the fear my wife feels whenever she sends me to the grocery store.

On the other side of the bridge was a cliff, 500 or 600 feet high. The horses went right up it. Trigger found each tiny notch in the rocks by feeling around with his horseshoe as though he were typing a blog. Then, when his posting seemed to be put strongly enough—
DEATH TO REPUBLICANS ON OUR BACKS
!!!—he pressed “send.” I didn't die, because there was always one part of Trigger that held still enough for desperate clinging to. His withers were firmly planted as his backside fluttered in the breeze. His loins stayed solid while everything up front gyrated in scree.

Trigger climbed hoof over hoof. And here was an excellent idea for yuppie sports marketing, if I survived—horseback climbing walls. Indoor facilities could be built in Southampton, Palm Beach, and Beverly Hills. A rider and steed, in one big harness, are top-roped and belayed by a dozen climbing coaches. “Left rear hoof on the red hoof-hold,” shout the climbing coaches. “Hook your right front pastern over the blue. Don't look down!”

Or up. Because at the top of the cliff there was no top. There was more and steeper cliff. Traversing this was a path
the width of a dollar bill. The landscape had been turned 180 degrees. The horizon was viewed by ignoring the climbing coaches' advice.

I don't own a hunting cap, and I wasn't about to show up in Kyrgyzstan wearing my daughter Poppet's pink Hello Kitty bicycle helmet. Now I saw that headgear was necessary only to preserve enough dental work to make the corpse identifiable. I rode with one stirrup banging against the cliff face like the knell of doom and the other a footrest on the bottomless pit. Beyond the cliff were forest glades of the kind that, at an American ski resort, put an end to Michael Kennedy. He had it easy. The wet clay of Kyrgyzstan is deeper and faster than Rocky Mountain powder and Trigger is more self-willed than any pair of Rossignols. We went up, which was bad; then down, which was worse. Plummeting through a boulder-choked chute, there were times when Trigger was beyond vertical, when my boot heels were out past his ears, and, no, I didn't need a haircut, that was Trigger's tail flop-ping over my face.

After nine hours we reached camp on the Arkit Sai River. Shamil and Alexandra have two seven-ton, six-wheel-drive ex-military trucks, surplus from the Soviet Union's Afghan war. One is rigged as a kitchen and the other carries the gear. A camp staff of half a dozen rode in these down logging skids and sheep tracks and across country to meet us each evening. Tents were up. Latrines had been dug. A table was set with a line of vodka bottles down the middle. A local lamb was roasting. And I was splayed on the riverbank reveling in my good fortune. I wasn't dead. And I wasn't dead in a magnificent place. And I magnificently wasn't dead among splendid people, whom I've neglected to mention because I've been too busy being scared.

There were fourteen of us, including Adrian, Alexandra, and Shamil. It was such an intrepid cast of characters on such a thrilling journey during which I got beaten to such a pulp that introductions may be made according to pulp thriller conventions.

Andrew Stott—senior executive for Nestle, UK, master of campcraft and avid foxhunter, who could lead a charge of the Light Brigade every bit as well as he charges (quite reasonably) for coffee and cocoa.

Ettie Boyd—superb athlete and corporate headhunter, the horsewoman who saved me from my own “Into the Valley of Death” experience by tactfully pointing out that whipping Trigger while yanking on his reins was making him as confused and stupid as . . .

“Me?” I suggested.

Claire Morrissey—North Dublin colleen possessed of the Irish way with dumb animals, sits on a horse with the same aplomb and authority as Tip O'Neill sat in the House of Representatives (but cuts a much finer figure).

Jennie Crohill—Norfolk countrywoman and seemingly an unassuming farm inspector for the British government but actually the hero who shot the last feral coypu in England. (It would sound more thrillerish if I left that unexplained, but a coypu is a nutria, a giant South American aquatic rat with a body two feet long. They were raised for fur, escaped, bred in the wild, and were playing merry hell with the Norfolk marshes.)

Bahar Ghaffari—exquisite Persian miniature, looks nineteen but is a Master of the Universe investment banker in Hong Kong, juggling equity derivatives so complex they make Alan Greenspan's head throb.

Camilla Coventry—raised on a ranch in Australia, but she and Crocodile Dundee are from the outback the way
Lauren Bacall and Mel Brooks are from New York. Studied theater and can produce and direct
Annie Get Your Gun
and do all the stunt work, too.

Jean Baptiste Oldenhove de Guertechin and Gaetane Schaeken Willemaers, Belgians with educations as elaborate as their names. He a global management consultant with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. She an international finance lawyer and the former counsel to Belgium's minister of foreign affairs. They are on their honeymoon.

Harold van Lier—another Belgian, a movie producer turned hotelier because guest towels have more wit than entertainment executives. He is on his honeymoon as well.

Emily—Harold's beautiful English bride, a relief worker specializing in third world sanitation problems (of which I was one at the moment). She has given up international aid work to come to the aid of, well, people such as ourselves, at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Brittany. As the name implies, it has plenty of sanitation.

“In your article about Kyrgyzstan,” said Harold, “you must not use the term ‘tour group.' It is as if we had silly Americans along in pink Hello Kitty bicycle helmets. None of us would ever join a ‘tour group.' We are a ‘tour horde.' We will sweep down upon Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent and pillage . . . since some of us are Belgians . . . their chocolate and lace.”

“You had better have another vodka,” said Shamil, “because tomorrow the riding becomes difficult.”

We rode through the village of Kizel Kel', where Djuman Kul and our horses were from. A lone electrical wire and
a notional road connected it to the world. And even this much civilization the Kyrgyz leave, spring through fall, to graze their herds in the mountain pastures. Stay-behind women and kids and the eighty-year-old blacksmith (who had “about forty” grandchildren) came out to say hello and feed us apricot jam.

We went up into a cartoon-beautiful forest, climbing with animation—feature-length animation—through Shrek-colored fern glades with sunlight pixilating in the tree leaves. Irish Claire herself had never seen anything so green. We emerged to a view that looked even less real and left me faint with a wish that it weren't. We were on a scythe blade of a ridge, thousands of feet in the air. Snowcapped mountains loomed, but they loomed below us. We could see rivers, in extremely small scale—threads of blue monofilament. Mile-wide turquoise lakes glinted minutely, beads lost in a shag rug. We were at the top of the Chakal range of the Tian Shan, above everything.

Above almost everything. Obese thunderheads materialized on top of us. Jovian flatulence erupted. The sky would have been black if it hadn't been bright orange with lightning. Gaetane's curly hair stood on end, making a nimbus three times the size of her head.

“It is an interesting phenomenon, an effect of ionization,” said Jean Baptiste.

“You look like Medusa,” said Harold, “But much prettier, of course, and without the snakes.”

“@#$%! GET DOWN!” screamed the nervous person from a country with frequently toasted golfers.

The best we could do was a thicket of stunted trees with a lush undergrowth of stinging nettles. It poured. It blew. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. The nettles
were enjoyed by the horses. Ettie and Claire got under their mounts. This, if you've seen a horse relieve itself, was a calculated risk of a worse wetting. Camilla said, “I know what—
The Sound of Music
.”

The path descending from the ridge was washed out. Shamil found a crevasse leading . . . somewhere. It was too muck-sunk and brush-filled to ride. We had to lead the horses. An enormous creature is behind you, threatening at every moment to add the mud luge to the list of Olympic equestrian events. Taking a fall on a horse is just a matter of one's own slobby body mass index hitting the ground. It is not to be compared to having a horse take a fall on you. There were places where leading was impossible. We had to jump and slide on our own, then call the horses like dogs, asking them to perform stunts that Lassie would have left Timmy down the well rather than attempt.

Trigger, who'd shown no previous inclination to obey, or even notice me, turned petlike and followed with puppyish devotion. The crevasse opened into a gorge, and the gorge opened into a canyon, and once, when he and I were stuck on a ledge, Trigger gave me a little nudge away from the abyss. (Though it's possible Trigger is dyslexic and was pushing in the wrong direction.)

The rain kept on and so did we, in a trail-breaking slog until our spirits had descended as far as we had. And there on the canyon floor were our trucks. Using a frayed old Soviet topo map, drivers Valeri and Andrei had guessed where we might emerge. The cook, Tyota Vera, and her helpers Nadia and Lyuda had a hot meal ready. A tarp was stretched over the table.

“You had better have another vodka,” said Shamil, “because tomorrow the riding becomes
very
difficult.”

It did. We climbed 3,000 feet up a slope like a graph of crude oil prices to have lunch with the shepards of Kizel Kel'. Their yurts are streamlined for the mountain winds—Airstream trailers made of felt but with more spacious and contemporary open-plan interiors. We ate yogurt and little balls of goat cheese fermented in burlap sacks hanging outside the yurts, and we drank the whey that dripped from the bags. The Kyrgyz bring little with them by way of provisions except their livestock. There was a lot of gawking, mostly from the Kyrgyz. Being nomads, they are tourists themselves, and after a wet night in camp and a long ride we were a sight. Emily, with her background in relief work, was relieved to see no relief was needed. The camp's three families and their fourteen kids were smiling and fit. Either they lead much healthier lives than we do or they roll their sick down the hill. I imagined the size of the saddlebag needed to carry to the mountaintop my family's sunblock, bug spray, asthma inhalers, orthodontic retainers, vitamins, dietary supplements, and bottles of shampoo and conditioner formulated to correct high-altitude dryness and split ends. We rode out though a canyon with walls that will dwarf the luxury resort that
is going to be built there someday, through clouds of blue butterflies where the parking lot will be, and under a natural bridge, naming rights available. The striated sediment in the sandstone cliffs had been bent by mountain-building into a gargantuan taffy pull. Owners of leisure homes will be sure to frame this view in the master suite's Palladian window. Hundreds of feet up, ibex skittered across the openings of unexplored caves. Unexplored cave tours at ten, noon, and two. Shamil, reconnoitering the canyon on foot a month before, had seen a Tian Shan brown bear and the spoor of a snow leopard. Call the concierge for safari bus reservations.